French Encounters of the Close Kind

1954: Quarouble Nord-Pas-de-Calais. During the intense UFO wave of 1954, Marius Dewilde had a bizarre experience on the night of 10 September. He had gone to calm his barking dog. Mr. Dewilde was shocked when his flashlight illuminated two short creatures with large heads, dressed in what appeared to be 'diving suits.' He lunged at them, but was blinded by a brilliant beam of light, and saw a strange object rising into the air. The image above is a newspaper with an aritists rendering of the encounter and an actual photo of Marius Dewilde. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Dewilde

1965: Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute Provence. Farmer Maurice Masse heard a hissing sound and saw a spherical shaped object, as big as a small car land in his lavender field on the morning of 1 July. Two small humanoids with large heads seemed to be inspecting his plants. As he got closer, one of the beings saw him and pointed a strange object at him. He found himself paralyzed and feeling somewhat tranquilized. After the UFO left marks were found in the field and days later the lavender began to die within 5 to 6 meters from where the UFO landed. The local gendarmerie believed his story and effects from the incident were still felt eight years after wards. http://ufoevidence.org/cases/case140.htm The image below is of Maurice Masse standing where the object landed.

1981: Trans-en-Provence, Var. The truth of this case largely stands on the testimony of one witness. On 8 January, Renato Nicolai claimed he saw a metallic, disk shaped object touch down on land below his farm house at dusk. The object quickly left took off and disappeared, leaving behind circular traces on the ground. Plant and soil samples were subjected to a detailed scientific investigation by scientists from GEPAN (Study Group into Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena). GEPAN concluded that a heavy, metal object had impacted on the ground, which had been subjected to intense heat. This has become one of the best 'physical trace' cases in the UFO literature. http://www.ufocasebook.com/transenprovince.html The image below is an artists rendering of what Renato Nicolai claimed to have observed.

1994: Air France Flight 3532, in flight from Nice to London. On 28 January, shortly after noon, the flight crew of an Air France Airbus saw an reddish-brown object of "immense size" and "constantly changing shape"-to the flight captain it looked "like an enormous lens" and changed shape several times before it disappeared. Ground radar confirmed an unidentified trace crossing Flight 3532's trajectory at the time of the sighting. The GEPAN study concludes: "The case has never been explained to this day and leaves the door open to all possible hypotheses." http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1062.htm The image below is an artists rendering of the Air France encounter. As often happens with artists who are unfamiliar with aircraft-the plane is wrong-looks to me like he drew a 727 and it should have been a twin-engined Airbus A319. Of course it is the image of the unidentified object that is most important so I went ahead and posted it.

I hope there are no spacing problems when I post this as there usually are when I try to do multiple images-if so I will try to work them out. I was going to put a 1968 French case in with these, but thought it deserved its own post. I would also like to do a single post about a 1978 case in Australia and a 1980 case in Texas, USA. However, the next series I would like to do is just a short bit of Fortean history that I think will be interesting and different from the things I have done before here, I hope to have it here fairly soon. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by and thanks so very much for your intelligent and thougtful comments!